Smart-growth planners believe that Americans live the wrong way, and they use land-use regulation to impose on others what they believe is the right way to live. Surveys consistently show that all but 15 percent to 25 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes with a yard, but planners think we would be better off if a much higher percentage lived in high-density apartments or condos.

Consider my former hometown of Portland, Ore., which many consider the nation's leader in smart-growth planning. To increase urban densities, planners are turning dozens of neighborhoods of single-family homes into apartments and condos. While past land-use rules set maximum densities, Portland's rules set minimum densities.

This means if your neighbors own a vacant lot, they cannot build a single-family house on it; they must build a rowhouse or apartment. In some cases, regulation is so strict that, if your house burns down, you cannot rebuild it; you must replace it with an apartment.

Portland planners soon decided that rowhouses and low-rise apartments were not dense enough, so they increased height limits to 50 feet or 60 feet to allow four- and five-story mid-rise apartments. Even that isn't dense enough, so now they are beginning to encourage high-rises.

After the first high-density developments saturated the demand, planners supplemented land-use mandates with tax breaks, below-market land sales and other subsidies to developers who built high-density housing. This means Portland neighborhoods continue to be invaded by mid-rise and high-rise developments, even though there is no more demand for dense housing.

Many of these developments are in transit corridors. Yet independent studies reveal that the people living in them don't ride transit significantly more than residents of single-family neighborhoods.

Portlanders did not welcome densification. Almost all of the targeted neighborhoods fought it; almost all of them lost. Planners followed a divide-and-conquer strategy, taking one neighborhood at a time so opponents could not build up enough momentum to stop the process.

Increased densities destroyed the small-town atmosphere that once made Portland attractive. Congestion is worse, housing and consumer costs are high, and urban services such as fire, police and schools have declined as the city took money from these programs to subsidize high-density developers.

Despite these problems, scores of cities from Missoula, Mont., to San Diego, Calif., have passed similar smart-growth regulations. Planners want to use smart growth everywhere they can, including Houston.

To get out of Portland, I moved to an exurban neighborhood 150 miles away. Like many Houston neighborhoods, we have a homeowners association and deed restrictions, so we will never have to worry about outside planners imposing some unwanted development on us.

Unlike most other cities, Houston makes it easy to create homeowners associations in neighborhoods that do not have them. Houston's system of deed restrictions puts you and your neighbors in charge of your neighborhood's future.

By contrast, smart-growth planning puts your neighborhood's future in the hands of people who may know little about you or your neighbors and whose ideas about how you should live may be very different from yours. If you want to protect your neighborhood from high-rises and other unwanted developments, then smart-growth planning is the last thing you need.

The truth about second-hand smoking is finally out.

Thanks to some unusual candour on the part of the anti-tobacco brigade in New York City, we now have official confirmation that banning smoking in public has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the health of non-smokers from second-hand smoke, but everything to do with stigmatising both smoking and smokers. Closer to home, new evidence from the National Health Service (NHS) shows that the public smoking ban in England has made absolutely no positive difference in smoking rates, despite claims made by its champions that it would.

In September, Dr Thomas Farley, New York City's Health Commissioner, proposed banning smoking at all of the city's parks and beaches (1). Dr Farley's rationale for the ban has nothing to do with the risks that outdoor smoking pose to non-smokers, but rather with preventing people, particularly children, from having to see anyone smoking in public. Farley says, 'We don't think children should have to watch someone smoking'. Farley also defends the extension of the smoking ban to outdoor areas by arguing that it is 'part of a broader strategy to further curb smoking rates'. New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, confirmed earlier this month that he would implement Farley's proposal, arguing that the public is 'overwhelmingly in favour' (2).

Why have the champions of banning smoking everywhere, even in private accommodation, suddenly come clean about the driving force behind their crusade? The answer is that they have essentially won the war over public smoking. But why is this the case? The answer, sadly, is that for the past 15 to 20 years, the public has been bombarded with a carefully orchestrated government-funded anti-tobacco campaign to convince them — in contradiction of the scientific evidence — that smokers pose a deadly health risk to non-smokers, particularly children.

The scientific evidence has never supported the case against public smoking. The US Environmental Protection Agency's seminal early 1990s report on second-hand smoke was severely flawed. Its critique of second-hand smoke was only sustained through a careful exclusion of non-confirming evidence and a non-traditional application of the statistical test known as confidence limits. The report was subjected to a scathing analysis by a US federal court, which rejected its scientific claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, a finding that even on appeal was not reversed (3).

Moreover, a scientific study conducted by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer found that there was no statistically significant association between smoking in the workplace and social settings and lung cancer in non-smokers. Indeed, the majority of studies about second-hand smoke and lung cancer in non-smokers have found non-statistically significant associations both in workplace and domestic settings.

Of course, none of this startling lack of scientific evidence has moved beyond the scientific journals and into the public domain, which means that the debate about public smoking is a non-scientific debate. And this means that it can proceed on virtually any grounds, unchecked by the need for careful and verifiable scientific evidence. The anti-smoking movement has always known that the evidence about the risks of public smoking, or private smoking for that matter, to non-smokers was marginal, at best, and nonexistent, at worst. But this was fundamentally unimportant.

Preventing people from smoking in public was never about real health risks - that is, it was never about protecting non-smokers so much as it was about stigmatising smoking and smokers and making it difficult for them to smoke. So with the science of second-hand smoke now never discussed, the anti-tobacco movement feels confident in moving the argument forward and revealing the starkness of its real agenda.

There is no compelling evidence that second-hand smoke poses a health risk to anyone in open spaces like public parks and beaches, but that is beside the point. The new push seeks, first, to demonise smoking and, second, to exert a brazen paternalism in which it is made virtually impossible for smokers — for their own good, of course — to light up in any public space.

There are profound difficulties with both of these objectives. For one thing, where is the justification for banning unhealthy behaviours from the public square simply on the grounds that someone might see them? Or, indeed, what is the justification for banning unhealthy behaviours from public viewing full stop? This opens up substantial room for prohibiting an enormous range of other behaviours which are neither immoral nor illegal, but simply unhealthy.

For example, by parity of reasoning it could be argued that children should never have to see anyone eating unhealthy foods in public, or indeed see anyone who is fat in public. Surely, there must be some evidence that seeing someone engaged in unhealthy behaviour puts others at risk. But where is this evidence?

For another thing, there is the issue of whether such measures actually work. For example, the NHS recently released a study on the effectiveness of the public smoking ban (4). The fact is that certain groups, such as young males, are smoking more after the smoking ban than before it. So, not only are such bans not supported by science, they are also not supported by the evidence on their practical effect in changing behaviour.

Finally, any policy by which the government engages in stigmatising the legal behaviour of its adult citizens is repugnant in a democratic society. Fundamental to democratic government is the respect that it owes to its adult citizens' choices about legal behaviour and, more fundamentally, how they choose to live their lives. Paternalistic interventions, whether through stigmatising or other means, can only be justified in the rarest of instances.

What the evolution of the debate over public smoking shows is how little science has to do with the anti-tobacco crusade, how disingenuous that crusade is about its real motives and goals, how easily the crusade on tobacco can be extended to other causes (most notably the war on obesity), and how fundamentally dangerous it is to a society both free and democratic.

(1) New York Eyes 'No Smoking' Outdoors, Too, New York Times, 15 September 2009 (2) Mayor Bloomberg vows to snuff out smoking in parks, beaches, New York Daily News, 1 October 2009 (3) For more on the EPA study, see An epidemic of epidemiology, by Rob Lyons (4) See Statistics on smoking, NHS, 29 September 2009 [pdf]

TOBAL is short for "There Oughtta Be a Law." Here's the progression of symptoms: Wrenching anecdotes about the effects of some alleged new trend make national news. A panic takes root in the media. Earnest editorialists scrawl urgent pleas for action. Politicians grandstand. Soon enough, we have our new law or regulation. It doesn't matter if the law is enforceable or may have unintended consequences. Nor does it matter if the law will have any actual effect on the problem it was passed to address. In fact, it doesn't even matter if the problem actually exists. The mere feeling that it exists is sufficient.

And so it goes with the panic over texting while driving. I'm not going to defend the act of clumsily thumbing out an E-mail while guiding a 2-ton, gasoline-loaded missile down the highway at 70 miles per hour. That's foolish. Nor will I argue there's some right to drive while iPhone-ing tucked into a constitutional penumbra. I will argue that we need to get over the idea that we can solve every bad habit with a new law. We can't, and this issue illustrates why.

Let's start with the alleged problem. Obviously, we have more people texting behind the wheel today than we did in, say, 1985. And undeniably, those people pose a threat. But it's hard to find definitive empirical support for the idea that our highways are awash in BlackBerry-spilled blood. Since 1995, there's been an eightfold increase in cellphone subscribers in the United States, and we've increased the number of minutes spent on cellphones by a factor of 58.

What's happened to traffic fatalities in that time? They've dropped — slightly, but they've dropped. Overall reported accidents since 1997 have dropped, too, from 6.7 million to 6 million. Proponents of a ban on cellphones say those numbers should have dropped more. "We've spent billions on air bags, antilock brakes, better steering, safer cars and roads, but the number of fatalities has remained constant," safety researcher David Strayer told the New York Times in July. "Our return on investment for those billions is zero. And that's because we're using devices in our cars."

Strayer would have a point if he were looking at the right statistics. But we drive a lot more than we did in 1995. Deaths in proportion to passenger miles are a far better indicator of road safety than overall fatalities. In 1995, there were 1.72 deaths for every 100 million miles traveled. By 2007, the figure had dropped to 1.36, a 21 percent decline. That's hardly remaining constant. But let's assume that even those numbers would be lower were it not for texting drivers. It's still far from clear that banning texting will make us safer. There are countless other driver distractions

that we'd never think of banning, from having kids in the back seat, to eating or drinking while driving, to fumbling with the radio. Certainly, it's foolish to type out text messages behind the wheel, but what about merely reading from your phone?

Are you more impaired following MapQuest directions from your Palm Pre while driving than reading them from a sheet of paper? What if you're looking at a GPS navigation device that's only slightly larger than your cellphone? What if the GPS system is on your cellphone?

That brings us to the enforceability problem. Maryland just passed a texting ban, but state officials are flummoxed over how to enforce it. The law bans texting while driving but allows for reading texts, for precisely the reasons just mentioned. But how can a police officer positioned at the side of a highway tell if the driver of the car that just flew by was actually pushing buttons on his cellphone and not merely reading the display screen? Unless a motorist is blatantly typing away at eye level, a car would need to be moving slowly enough for an officer to see inside, focus on the phone, and observe the driver manipulating the buttons. Which is to say the car would probably need to be stopped — at which point it ceases to be a safety hazard.

But let's say you're OK with a ban on reading cellphone messages, too. How would you write that law? Would you prohibit so much as a glance in the general direction of a cellphone while driving? Should we mandate that cellphones be stored out of the driver's sight while the car isn't in park? What about other things that might distract him from the road, like navigation systems? Shiny objects? Pretty girls in the passenger seat? How would you prove a driver was looking at a cellphone and not something near it?

If you want to increase the penalties for reckless driving, go ahead. If cellphone records show a driver was browsing baseball scores at the time he caused an accident, increase his fines and punishment. That at least makes some sense. But don't pass useless laws that will be arbitrarily enforced simply because "we have to do something."

We've seen similar nonsense on display with the general use of cellphones while driving. Though several states have passed bans, all make exceptions for hands-free devices. But we know the level of impairment of drivers using hands-free devices is essentially the same as that of drivers holding a phone. These laws aren't about safety; they're about symbolism.

Here are two things these bans will do: They'll give police officers another reason to pull people over, and they'll bring in revenue for the municipalities that aggressively enforce them. I think both are arguments against a ban. You may disagree, but the one thing these bans aren't likely to do is make the roads much safer. And if they won't accomplish that, there's no reason to enact them.

"Fannie Med" is all but dead. Good riddance.

President Obama's "government option" had no business being part of health reform. It was more radical than the Clinton health plan, which the American people soundly rejected. Of course the government's special advantages would drive private insurers out of business, a point that honest supporters readily admit. But the real problem is that the government plan would have increased costs and suppressed quality for all patients, publicly and privately insured.

What's more, the votes just aren't there. Somebody tell Democratic Sen. Max Baucus he can stop performing CPR. Have GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe call the time of death. And let's move on, because there are real solutions to be had.

Though misguided, the government option tapped into palpable frustrations. Private insurance doesn't provide the affordable, secure coverage that consumers want. Invariably, the problem is inane government policies that protect insurance companies from competition.

Why do insurance companies sell to employers rather than compete for every last consumer? Because unless we surrender our earnings and our coverage decisions to an employer, the federal government hits us with a major tax penalty, as we must use after-tax income to buy individual polices (as opposed to the before-tax paycheck deductions employers make to pay for coverage). The fact that most health insurance disappears at the moment we most need it — when we lose our jobs — is just one indication the system is rigged to serve someone other than us.

Let the workers control those earnings and choose secure health plans, and we will ruthlessly drive from the market insurers who overcharge us or shirk on their commitments to care for the sick. As the president recommends, there are reforms that can get us there gradually, with minimal disruption.

Obama says there isn't enough competition among insurance companies. And he's right: Each state protects its domestic insurers from competition by barring entry to products licensed by other states. If you live in California, you can't buy a less-expensive policy available in Nevada.

According to one estimate, Congress could extend coverage to about a third of the uninsured simply by sweeping away those barriers to interstate competition. It wouldn't even have to raise taxes or create a single new government subsidy.

If one new competitor would "keep insurance companies honest," imagine what dozens of new competitors would do.

Instead of holding the insurance companies' feet to the fire, however, Democrats plan to enact rules that the incumbent insurers want — rules that would further protect them from competition.

The House and Senate legislation would make health insurance compulsory for most or all Americans, with heavy subsidies to help them afford it. Handing private insurers a guaranteed and heavily subsidized customer base would amount to an unjustified windfall for an industry that isn't exactly struggling. Regulations on pricing and benefits would further protect insurers from competition by standardizing product design.

Is it any wonder the insurance companies support compulsory health insurance?

Everyone from libertarians to single-payer advocates can agree: We should be getting more out of private insurance companies — not putting more into them.

Who exposed this latest bit of corruption at ACORN? -- The FBI? The local police? A congressional investigating committee? The mainstream media? No, no, no, no. It was a 20-year-old-girl named Hannah Giles and a 25-year-old law student and investigative journalist named James O'Keefe.

I first met Ms. Giles almost a year ago in her home town of Miami. Through mutual friends, she contacted me to see if I could help her get an internship with a policy group in Washington. She ultimately interned this summer at the National Journalism Center and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. Having heard about the various charges of voter and housing fraud that ACORN had been previously charged with, she decided to learn more.

ACORN claims it provides assistance to people who are trying to obtain housing and set up businesses in low-income areas. Given ACORN's sleazy record, Ms. Giles began to wonder if ACORN would also give help to those who were trying to start illegal businesses.

She contacted James O'Keefe, whom she had never met. Mr. O'Keefe, despite his youth, had already established a reputation as a highly competent and enterprising investigative journalist. Mr. O'Keefe, like President Obama, had studied Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," but his goal was to turn the tables and use the "rules" against the radical left.

Ms. Giles suggested to Mr. O'Keefe that she pretend to be a prostitute and that he play the part of her pimp to see if ACORN would help them set up a house of prostitution. Mr. O'Keefe liked the idea and agreed to work with Ms. Giles.

Using a hidden mike and camera, they first went to the ACORN office in Baltimore, and were quite stunned that the ACORN officials offered to help them -- even though they made it very clear that they wanted to set up an illegal house of prostitution and bring in underage girls from Central America to work in the house. (The video tapes of their meetings in ACORN offices can be found on www.biggovernment.com.)

Emboldened by their first success and wanting to make sure the Baltimore ACORN office was not a fluke, they then went to ACORN's office here in the District, then to Brooklyn, San Bernadino, Ca., and other cities around the country. They were given detailed legal instructions on how to avoid problems with the police and tax authorities while running an illegal operation in each location, and even made other offers of help. They funded all of their travel and other expenses out of their own pockets without any organizational support.

Lawyers, who have reviewed the tapes, believe the ACORN officials may have violated dozens of laws and regulations, and perhaps even the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes against racketeering and organized crime. After Glenn Beck and Fox News showed the Baltimore tape last Thursday, ACORN officials, clearly not knowing the extent of the O'Keefe-Giles investigation, claimed that the Baltimore officials were rogue employees and fired them.

The next day, when the D.C. tapes were released, ACORN fired two more employees, and the Census Bureau said it would no longer contract with ACORN. Mr. O'Keefe has been working with the noted journalist Andrew Breitbart to expose what he and Ms. Giles uncovered. Mr. Beck, Sean Hannity, and others at Fox News and elsewhere have taken up the story and have had Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles on their shows.

ACORN officials have already made false charges against Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe, and the media organizations that have been exposing ACORN's activities. The Senate voted 83 to 7 on Monday to partially defund ACORN. As more tapes from more locations are released and ACORN's claims of not being thoroughly corrupt are shattered, it will be interesting to see the reaction of those in Congress, the administration and the media who have continued to be supportive of ACORN despite all of its past corruption.

Will they protect the taxpayers or the criminals?

Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe are true American patriots -- they did not wait around for the authorities or Congress to do something. They spotted a problem and they took action on their own at considerable personal expense and risk (though they are now being protected) to expose wrongdoing. The American Founding Fathers would be proud of Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe because they understood that more often than not, government is the problem not the solution -- and the Founders knew that the American Experiment would fail if citizens did not repetitively act to protect both their liberties and pocketbooks.

We can hope that Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe will serve as role models for millions of other young Americans who see that the present generation in Washington is stealing their financial future and liberty. All too many in the mainstream media have climbed in bed with government rather than doing their duty to expose governmental wrongdoing. By using the new technologies, smart amateurs with courage and good judgment are becoming effective investigative journalists.

The case involves a Florida statute determining the boundaries of oceanfront property. Under a 1961 law, the state drew a brand-new line separating public and private land on certain beaches, meaning that some land that would have been privately owned would belong instead to the state. A group of property owners filed suit, arguing that the law deprived them of property without just compensation, violating the state and federal constitutions.

Last December, Florida's highest court rejected their arguments. It held that, while the new boundary gave the state ownership of the beach land, the former owners actually had no such right to begin with. Despite more than a century of Florida law to the contrary, the court announced that the owners actually only had a right to "access" the ocean, and because the state promised to allow them to keep crossing the land to reach the water, it actually hadn't taken anything away when it seized the land itself.

Thus, by simply reinterpreting state property law, the court allowed the state to take property without compensation with a mere stroke of a pen. Yet the U.S. Constitution forbids states from confiscating property — even through legal legerdemain — without payment.

States enjoy a great deal of autonomy in our federalist system, and nowhere is this truer than in property law. States have diverse rules governing what property is recognized and how it may be bought, sold or used. Federal courts normally have no say regarding how state courts interpret their property rules — even if a state's decisions are unprecedented or wrong.

But the U.S. Constitution also guarantees every American's right to due process of law and to protection of private property. If state judges can arbitrarily rewrite a state's property laws, those guarantees would be meaningless. More than four decades ago, Justice Potter Stewart warned that, without a constitutional limit on the states' power to determine the nature of property, states could "defeat the constitutional prohibition against taking property without due process of law by the simple device of asserting retroactively that the property it has taken never existed at all."

In 1993, Stewart's fears came true when the Oregon Supreme Court unexpectedly announced that waterfront property owners could not exclude the public from private beaches. Although federal courts refused to intervene, justices Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor objected. "As a general matter, the Constitution leaves the law of real property to the States," they wrote. "But just as a State may not deny rights protected under the Federal Constitution through pretextual procedural rulings, neither may it do so by invoking nonexistent rules of state substantive law."

There must be some limit on the power of state courts to redefine property rights. The Supreme Court long ago limited their power to change other laws in ways that infringe on constitutional freedoms. Southern judges often used cunning interpretations of state law to silence civil rights protesters, only to be reversed by the high court. In one case, after a group of activists was convicted of trespass after holding a sit-in, the justices overruled the conviction on the ground that the South Carolina Supreme Court had "unforeseeably and retroactively expanded [the statute] by judicial construction," in violation of due process.

The Court has particular reason to scrutinize state manipulations of property law. It held in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council that the U.S. Constitution requires compensation for restrictions on how property owners may use land — but not if those uses were already barred by "the background principles of the State's law." The ambiguity of "background principles" invited states to rewrite their rules to seize property by fiat. "If anything that a state court chooses to denominate 'background law' — regardless of whether it is really such — could eliminate property rights," wrote Scalia a year later, "our opinion in Lucas...would be a nullity."

These cases are about more than federalism and property law. They represent a crisis in political philosophy. In recent decades, the basic constitutional principles of liberty and property have been gradually replaced with the view that bureaucrats should be free to rearrange property to satisfy electoral mandates.

When the U.S. Constitution was written, there was broad consensus in America that private property was a fundamental human right and that government existed to protect it, not to manipulate it to serve purposes politicians deemed more important. But today, the nation's intellectual elite — and particularly judges — have rejected the traditional principles underlying property rights. They see property as simply a privilege the government can alter or rearrange at will. America's founders believed that a person's right to own, buy, sell and use property was a timeless moral principle, not a temporary expedient that changes based on who wins elections. Hence the clash between today's lawmakers — who want maximum power to manipulate property — and permanent constitutional principles designed to protect each individual's right to pursue happiness.

The Supreme Court should take a strong stand against states that redefine rights to suit their own interests. Private property rights are fundamental to the U.S. Constitution. That's why it limits state authority: to protect us against governors, legislators and judges.

Those reforms reveal that the Obama plan would mean higher health insurance premiums for millions, would reduce choice by eliminating both low-cost and comprehensive health plans, would encourage insurers to avoid the sick and would reduce the quality of care.

Massachusetts reduced its uninsured population by two-thirds — yet the cost would be considered staggering, had state officials not done such a good job of hiding it. Finally, Massachusetts shows where "ObamaCare" would ultimately lead: Officials are already laying the groundwork for government rationing.

The most sweeping provision in the Massachusetts reforms — and the legislation before Congress — is an "individual mandate" that makes health insurance compulsory. Massachusetts shows that such a mandate would oust millions from their low-cost health plans and force them to pay higher premiums.

The necessity of specifying what satisfies the mandate gives politicians enormous power to dictate the content of every American's health plan — a power that health care providers inevitably capture and use to increase the required level of insurance.

In the three years since Massachusetts enacted its individual mandate, providers successfully lobbied to require 16 specific types of coverage under the mandate: prescription drugs, preventive care, diabetes self-management, drug-abuse treatment, early intervention for autism, hospice care, hormone replacement therapy, non-in-vitro fertility services, orthotics, prosthetics, telemedicine, testicular cancer, lay midwives, nurses, nurse practitioners and pediatric specialists.

The Massachusetts Legislature is considering more than 70 additional requirements.

Those requirements can increase premiums by 14 percent or more. Officials further increased premiums by imposing new limits on cost-sharing.

"The effect," writes the Boston Globe, "has been to provide more comprehensive insurance than in most other states but also to raise costs." Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average, in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans.

Massachusetts long ago adopted another feature of the Obama plan: price controls that prohibit insurers from varying premiums based on a purchaser's health status. Those price controls further increase premiums for the young and healthy.

They also eliminate comprehensive health plans. Obama adviser David Cutler found that in Harvard University's price-controlled health insurance exchange, "adverse selection" or the attraction of the sickest patients caused premiums for the most comprehensive plan to rise until insurers eventually canceled it. Those price controls also encourage insurers to avoid the sick. And who can blame them, considering that the government is forcing them to sell a $50,000 policy for just $10,000?

One way insurers can avoid the $50,000 patients is to drop benefits those customers find attractive. Shelby Rogers is a 12-year-old girl with spinal muscular atrophy, whose parents chose an Aetna plan through the price-controlled health insurance exchange for federal workers. Last year, Aetna announced it would drop coverage for Shelby's 12-hour-a-day nurse, who, among other things, helps Shelby avoid bedsores by turning her over at night. An Aetna spokesman explained the reason was to avoid offering a benefit that causes the sickest patients to flock to the plan.

Over time, as mandates eliminate low-cost options and price controls eliminate comprehensive options, both the Massachusetts and Obama reforms will march consumers into a narrow range of health plans.

As goes choice, so goes quality. Statistics on waiting times for specialist care in Massachusetts read like a dispatch from Canada. In 2004, Boston already had the longest waits among metropolitan areas. By 2009, waits had generally shortened in other metro areas (average wait: less than three weeks) but lengthened in Boston (average wait: seven weeks), according to the Merritt Hawkins survey.

Voters who believe the Massachusetts law reduced the quality of care outnumber those who believe it helped by nearly 3-to-1 (29 percent to 10 percent).

Massachusetts has reduced the share of its population that lacks coverage from an estimated 8.3 percent in 2006 to an estimated 2.6 percent by June 2008. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who signed the Massachusetts reforms into law, boasts that "no other state has made as much progress in covering their uninsured."

Yet that achievement carries an exorbitant price tag: at least $2.1 billion this year, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a figure that doesn't even include the cost of the additional coverage discussed above. Since Massachusetts has covered just 432,000 previously uninsured residents, the cost of covering a previously uninsured family of four — at least $20,000 — is well above the average cost of an employer-sponsored family policy (about $13,000).

Had state officials not done their level best to hide those costs — the individual mandate pushed 60 percent of the cost off-budget, while expanding eligibility for Medicaid pushed another 20 percent onto the federal budget — no one would be hailing Massachusetts as a model.

As it is, Massachusetts has fooled some prominent watchdogs. The Boston Globe editorializes that the cost to the state taxpayer is "about $88 million a year," when the actual cost to state taxpayers is 19 times that amount, and the total cost is 24 times that amount.

The New York Times editorial page's account of the law's cost was only off by a factor of three.

Nevertheless, those costs are appearing in higher taxes and health insurance premiums. State officials have raised taxes on tobacco, hospitals, insurers and employers, as well as eliminated coverage for many legal immigrants just to scrape up their 20 percent share of the cost. They are also showing the nation where ObamaCare would ultimately lead: government-imposed rationing.

To cope with the cost of its reforms, Massachusetts created a legislative commission that has recommended moving the entire market to a single, Canadian-style payment system that would encourage doctors and hospitals to ration care.

The Legislature also plans to leverage its power under the individual mandate to require "evidence-based purchasing strategies," which is another way of saying government bureaucrats may soon be deciding who gets medical care and who does not.

When former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin whipped people into a frenzy over "death panels," she was warning not only against a proposal for end-of-life counseling but plans that would make it easier for Medicare to use its existing power to try to ration care to the elderly and disabled.

Massachusetts shows that Obama's individual mandate would expand federal power by enabling it to ration care to patients under age 65.

Though initially popular, enthusiasm for the Massachusetts reforms may be on the wane. A recent poll found that more Massachusetts voters say the law has made health insurance less affordable (27 percent) than believe it has made coverage more affordable (21 percent). Voters who believe the reforms have been a failure outnumber those who believe the reforms have been a success by 37 percent to 26 percent.

Each decision about care would mean millions or billions of dollars for interest groups that pressure legislators with all the means at their disposal. Already the physician lobby — led by the American Medical Association — dominates Medicare reimbursement decisions in this country. Physicians control the codes that are used for reimbursement and the committee that determines Medicare reimbursement rates.

Put the federal government in charge of deciding what is appropriate care, and special- interest groups will fight long and hard for a place on the list.

Politics, not patient needs or the need for increased access to care, will determine which procedures are covered.

Evidence of political influence in health care abounds, mostly at the state level, because that is where health care has been regulated. Increasing regulatory power at the federal level will bring out lobbyists' big guns, as any win is much bigger than it is at the state level.

If you want to see how corrupt government oversight can get and how it can work to produce outcomes that raise costs and reduce access, look to the various states.

At the state level, special-interest influence can be seen in regulations that limit the entry of medical professionals with unnecessary education requirements, define what medical professionals are allowed to do (scope-of-practice turf wars pit groups against one another fighting for legislative support), dictate benefits that health insurance must cover whether consumers want them or not, tie the hands of providers with rules like nurse-patient ratios, and restrict health maintenance organizations from being able to channel patients to physicians who agree to lower prices and other cost-saving behaviors.

These public policies are all the result of politicians yielding to pressures from special-interest groups. In each case, the result is that providers cannot experiment with cost-efficient methods of care. Health care is costly because state governments require it, even when there is absolutely no evidence to support the restrictions imposed on providers.

Because of a strong nurse lobby, Mississippi was the last state to allow physician assistants to practice. Physician assistants have prescribing authority over controlled drugs in 36 states, yet Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and Missouri don't allow them to prescribe any controlled substances.

Lobbyists have been successful in raising education requirements for many health professionals. All certified diabetic educators must have a master's degree. Advanced practice nurses and physician assistants have managed to get states to require that all new entrants have a master's degree, and we are on our way to a world in which doctorates will be required for advanced practice nurses, audiologists and other politically powerful groups.

This is no way to make health care accessible or affordable or, the evidence suggests, even safer.

The stronger the physician lobby in a state, the fewer options for care available to patients. Despite the progress made in incorporating midlevel clinicians, licensing and scope-of-practice rules still restrict providers' ability to employ medical professionals to their full competence. Licensing unnecessarily restricts nurse practitioners and other midlevel clinicians whose competence exceeds the legislatively imposed scope of practice.

The American Medical Association has a Scope of Practice Partnership designed explicitly to lobby for restrictions on the practice of other clearly qualified health care professionals. Expect more of the same when the Democrats' proposed plan gives a federal agency the power to decide who gets care and what services will be standard.

The way to lower the cost of health care and try innovative solutions to increase access is to reduce government intervention, not increase it. Expanding the authority of the federal government, as the Democrats propose, will lock us into the same inefficient methods of producing care we've used for the last 40 years.

The American Hospital Association and other groups have shown their strength at the state level, we see it in current negotiations at the federal level as well. These groups benefit from the status quo and from policies that limit competition.

As consumers, we would be foolish to support legislation that shifts more power to special interests by increasing federal oversight and regulation of the health care industry. We should be moving to limit state regulation instead of expanding the regulatory power at the federal level.

Some said they were thinking about getting out of medicine. Primary care physicians noted that fewer and fewer doctors choose to specialize in primary care, preferring the more highly reimbursed medical specialties as career paths. Patients complained about reduced access to physicians.

Clearly, all were concerned about rising costs. Facey Medical Foundation President and CEO Bill Gill said the lack of efficiency is an "indictment on industry." He noted that the basics of health care delivery have not changed in 40 years; we still get care by going to see a physician for a one-on-one visit. He argued for more integrated care and expanded use of electronic medical records to achieve efficiencies.

The most vocal of those in attendance called for universal coverage. The Veterans' Administration was mentioned twice as a model for the provision of care.

Many misconceptions went unchallenged. Speakers said that government insurance programs are less expensive to administer, that adding a government-provided program would increase competition, and more than one speaker portrayed insurance and pharmaceutical company profits as a bad thing. Even Gill's perception that inefficiency in the provision of health care is the industry's fault is incorrect.

Government programs are not less expensive to administer if you include fraud as a cost. Fraud on the part of providers seeking government reimbursement, although hard to measure, is thought to dwarf administrative costs in private companies. Medicare and Medi-Cal have cut costs by limiting what physicians and other providers get paid, a poor long-run strategy for the country as a whole.

Adding a government program would not increase competition because the government program would be cheaper for employers to use. The most likely case is that private companies would get out of the business of insuring low income individuals.

The role of profits in motivating desirable outcomes has to be one of the most poorly understood concepts on the planet. Profits reward efficiency and innovation. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies only make profits if they produce something people want to buy.

Finally, Mr. Gill's willingness to put the blame on the health care industry for the inefficiencies in health care delivery is admirable but not justified.

Health care is delivered in much the same way it was delivered 40 years ago because that is how it is reimbursed. In addition, providers are constrained by state laws which dictate limited scope of practice and excessive education requirements for medical professionals.

This all but precludes significant innovation in how individuals are assigned to tasks and in how patient care is provided. Federal Medicare and state Medi-Cal reimbursements dictate the role that physicians must play in providing care, even in situations where other medical professionals are eminently qualified to handle care.

One doctor, who chairs the Northridge Hospital Ethics Committee, did raise the important and relevant issue of excessive, costly, end-of-life care that has no potential for significantly extending life. If consumers had to pay a significant copayment, they might not demand unreasonable or unadvisable care.

Those in attendance Tuesday night went though a long wish list that included longer doctor visits, more accessible health care and additional services (including interpreting) and higher rates of reimbursement for physicians. Union representatives encouraged everyone to call their legislators to demand universal coverage. But universal coverage would not lead to higher reimbursement rates for physicians, an extension of services, or longer doctor visits. Just the opposite, as health care dollars would be stretched even further.

Given budget constraints, the only route to even partially addressing the wish list of those in attendance would be to provide care more efficiently, at a lower cost. The key to the efficient provision of care is for the state and federal government to stop micromanaging the provision of health care - freeing providers to offer services in ways that are cheaper and offer more access - and to shift some financial responsibility to consumers so that they are more likely to make reasonable demands of the system.

I suggest that state licensing of providers of services, such as contractors, barbers and land surveyors, could be eliminated. There are already many ways for consumers to judge quality on their own. With the state out of the picture, additional information would come from a variety of sources.

State licensing is used to restrict entry unnecessarily. Licensed professionals lobby legislators to increase education and training requirements for new entrants so that their own earnings will rise.

As long as tax revenues grow, it is politically expedient to accommodate the demands of professionals to restrict entry. But faced with a tight budget and pressing needs in critical areas such as health care, I would shift funds from licensing no matter how much the existing boards and professionals protest.

In many cases the primary licensing function is checking a candidate's education and criminal record. Without state licensing of contractors, private companies would offer similar services. Check out the Web page of the Piping Industry Progress Education and Trust Fund (www.pipe.org). It already has a link to lists of plumbers and heating or air conditioning contractors in your ZIP code.

Without the state's involvement, it would not be long before existing or new companies would step up to offer protection, putting their reputation behind the contractors they endorse, much like the private 1-800-Dentist dentist referral service.

Home builders might put their reputation behind swimming pool contractors, for example. Given these firms' deep pockets and ability to purchase insurance to protect consumers in the case of contractor negligence, many consumers would find themselves better protected than in the past.

Already, the non-profit National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying develops and administers the tests used for state licensing. If the state of California were to drop licensing, I would expect the NCEES to find a way to make this information available to consumers directly.

This would not be free or perfect, but the cost is likely to be significantly below that associated with government licensing. Also, the costs would be borne by those who use the services, not by taxpayers who may or may not use the services in question.

Currently, the California Contractors State License Board licenses many individual specialties, including landscaping, swimming pool contractors, earthwork and paving contractors, cabinet, and millwork and finish carpentry contractors. If the state were to eliminate its licensing boards, consumers would turn to other forms of information, including Angie's List, referrals from friends and brand names (Sears, OSH, Lowe's or Home Depot) to assure quality.

The Structural Pest Control Board protects the public from false advertising. There is no reason false advertising couldn't be managed by a state agency that does not also license. The state also licenses barbering and cosmetology, auto repair, and guide dog trainers. California is the only state in the nation to require licensing of guide dog instructors and schools.

With a barber or hairdresser, consumers can observe quality directly. Auto repair is an obvious case for using brand name. Many people already go to a dealer or to Sears. Independent repair shops could join together and develop a brand name (and reputation). This would significantly improve the level of information available to consumers.

Many individuals already use unlicensed contractors for small jobs, but it is illegal. Not everyone can afford or needs the level of education and training state licensing boards (under the influence of the profession) mandate. Eliminating state licensing would allow a broader range of service providers to advertise and develop a reputation over time. There is some evidence this would reduce injuries from do-it-yourself attempts on the part of consumers who can't afford a highly skilled licensed contractor.

The silver lining of a budget crisis is that it forces you to think about what you are doing and what you really need to do. In the case of licensing, getting the state out of the business of setting standards would actually benefit consumers.

As the national debate over health-care reform begins, many in Congress are looking to Massachusetts as a model for what that reform might look like. Indeed, from mandates and subsidies to some form of exchange or "connector," many of the key components of the Massachusetts reforms are likely to end up in the bill to be voted on this year.

But three years after it was voted in, experience suggests the "Massachusetts model" actually provides an object lesson in how not to reform health care. The program has failed in its main goal of achieving universal coverage. It has failed to restrain the growth in health-care costs. And it has greatly exceeded its initial budget, placing new burdens on the state's taxpayers.

There is no doubt that the Massachusetts program has reduced the number of people without health insurance in the state — but by how much is a matter of considerable dispute. According to official statistics, the state's uninsured rate has declined from 10.4 percent in 2006 to just 2.6 percent today. However, there are several reasons for doubting the accuracy of this number. For example, a door-to-door survey by the Census Bureau in March 2008 estimated that 5.4 percent of state residents were uninsured. And an examination of state income-tax returns indicates that roughly 5 percent of residents were uninsured as of Jan. 1, 2008. The best estimates suggest that more than 200,000 Massachusetts residents remain uninsured, out of the 670,000 uninsured in 2006. That's a far cry from the "universal coverage" that was promised when the bill was passed.

Health-care costs continue to rise much faster in Massachusetts than in the nation as a whole. Proponents of the reform promised that it would reduce costs. Gov. Mitt Romney said "the cost of health care would be reduced" and the plan would make health insurance "affordable" for every Massachusetts citizen. Supporters went so far as to suggest that the reforms would reduce the price of individual insurance policies by 25 to 40 percent. In reality, since the program became law, insurance premiums have been increasing by 10 to 12 percent per year, nearly double the national average. On average, health insurance costs $16,897 a year for a family of four in Massachusetts, compared to $12,700 nationally. Meanwhile, total health-care spending in the state has increased by 28 percent.

New regulation and bureaucracy are limiting consumer choice and adding to costs. A new mandate for prescription-drug coverage was added, and high-deductible policies were restricted. Some Massachusetts residents who were happy with their old insurance policies have had to change their coverage in order to comply with the mandates.

Although much of the burden falls on individual policy-holders, the costs to the taxpayers have also skyrocketed. Despite one tax increase already, the program faces huge deficits in the future. As a result, the state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a "global budget" on health-care spending — with its attendant rationing.

The reforms have added a new burden on companies, especially smaller ones, wanting to do business in the state. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council cites the Massachusetts health-care regulations and the mandate on companies as its reasons for ranking Massachusetts dead last among the 50 states for business-friendly health-care policies.

A shortage of providers, combined with higher demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician, especially primary-care providers. The wait for seeing an internist, for example, has nearly doubled since the reforms were implemented.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis rightly called America's state governments "the laboratories of democracy." States are able to experiment with policies on a small scale before these policies are adopted by the whole nation.

Let us hope that Congress learns from the failure of the Massachusetts experiment.

• Although the state has reduced the number of residents without health insurance, 200,000 people remain uninsured. Moreover, the increase in the number of insured is primarily due to the state's generous subsidies, not the celebrated individual mandate.
• Health care costs continue to rise much faster than the national average. Since 2006, total state health care spending has increased by 28 percent. Insurance premiums have increased by 8–10 percent per year, nearly double the national average.
• New regulations and bureaucracy are limiting consumer choice and adding to health care costs.
• Program costs have skyrocketed. Despite tax increases, the program faces huge deficits. The state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a "global budget" on health care spending—with its attendant rationing.
• A shortage of providers, combined with increased demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician.

With the "Massachusetts model" frequently cited as a blueprint for health care reform, it is important to recognize that giving the government greater control over our health care system will have grave consequences for taxpayers, providers, and health care consumers. That is the lesson of the Massachusetts model.

I say this not because I don't value the environmental impact of horse farms or the tracks' economic benefits. Rather, Maryland horse farms face little threat from racing's decline, and a horse racing industry that needs ongoing government support offers little economic benefit.

There are more than 3,000 horse farms in Maryland. Intervention supporters claim that, without the tracks, those farms could be replaced by development. But how many of Maryland's 30,000 horses are race horses? And how many of them run only at state tracks? A 2008 study found that the majority of state purse money in 2007 went to out-of-state owners.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's office claims that horse racing provides 5,800 direct jobs. Those workers certainly want to remain employed, but would it really benefit the state economy to maintain the jobs at taxpayer expense? Economic growth comes only when workers improve at producing valued goods, but horse racing is declining because consumers value other things more. Government intervention would only transfer resources away from higher-value, economy-boosting activities.

One other consideration counsels doing nothing: What special expertise does Maryland government have in horse racing?

Obama outlined a budget that would more than double federal taxes on general partners — the entrepreneurs who incur the risk of assembling and managing partnerships for startups, distressed companies, real estate projects and other ventures. A significant part of their compensation is what is termed "carried interest" — generally a 20 percent share of what's left over after a portfolio company has been sold, after limited partners have been repaid their capital contributions with a preferred return, and after partnership expenses have been paid.

Currently carried interest is taxed at a 15 percent capital gain tax rate, but President Obama wants to tax it at a 39 percent ordinary income tax rate.

"States will undoubtedly follow the lead of the federal government and treat carried interest as ordinary income, too," says Jim Anderson of SVB Financial Group, San Francisco, which serves about 550 venture capital partnerships in the U.S., India, China, Israel and the U.K. With higher federal taxes plus state taxes, general partners would face a total hit around 50 percent. The tax hikes don't apply to limited partners who provide the money, but they're not the ones who decide whether a business venture is started or where it would operate.

An advantage of a partnership structure, which has been used for decades, is that it tightly aligns the interest of the general partner with the interest of the limited partners who provide almost all the capital. The only way a general partner can make money from the carried interest is to run the business so that limited partners make money.

In this respect, a partnership offers a compelling advantage over a corporate structure, quite apart from the lower costs of a partnership. In recent years, we have seen the interest of corporate executives at odds with those of shareholders, as these executives arranged "poison pills," "golden parachutes" and outrageous bonuses even when they ran their companies into the ground.

Startup companies do not have access to public stock markets, bond markets or commercial paper markets, and often they cannot get commercial bank loans. Expertise and financial support — over $10 trillion — from venture capital firms as well as private equity firms is crucial. As University of Chicago economist Steven Kaplan put it: "Evidence for the positive productive effects of private equity is unequivocal."

SVB's Anderson believes that Obama's proposed tax hikes would be injurious for Silicon Valley, driving venture capital enterprise away to lower-tax jurisdictions and possibly out of the country. Big venture capital firms like Accel, Sequoia Capital and Summit Partners are exploring opportunities in Asia, China, Europe and the Mideast. Silicon Valley has depended on startups to maintain a fertile entrepreneurial environment as older companies lose their competitive edge.

Silicon Valley would be especially hard hit by Obama's soak-the-rich taxes. According to a recent survey, two Silicon Valley ZIP codes have the highest average gross incomes in the state. These people make the state's biggest mortgage payments, and Obama plans to squeeze them by reducing the deductibility of their mortgages. All this plus higher California taxes could spur an exodus that might eventually turn Silicon Valley into a ghost town.

I mean, really, really expensive. The average mile of light-rail line costs two to five times as much as an urban freeway lane-mile. Yet in 2007 the average light-rail line carried less than one-seventh as many people as the average freeway lane-mile in cities with light rail.

Do the math: Light rail costs 14 to 35 times as much to move people as highways.

The Government Accountability Office found that bus-rapid transit—frequent buses with limited stops—provided faster, better service at 2 percent of the capital cost and lower operating costs than light rail.

If light rail is so expensive, why are cities building it? Starting in the 1970s, Congress offered cities hundreds of millions of dollars for transit capital improvements. If they bought buses, they wouldn't have enough money to operate those buses.

So cities like Portland and Sacramento decided to build light rail—because it was expensive. Only light rail would use up all the millions of federal dollars. Other cities that wanted their share of federal pork soon began planning light rail, too.

How successful is light rail? In 1980, before Portland began building light rail, 9.8 percent of the region's commuters took transit to work. Today, it is 7.6 percent.

Since 1980, Portland has spent more than $2.3 billion, half the region's transportation capital funds, building light rail. Yet light rail carries less than 1 percent of Portland-area travel. That's a success?

In 2002, Dallas opened a new light-rail line, doubling the number of miles in the city's light-rail system. The new line attracted some rail riders, but the region lost more bus riders than it gained rail riders.

This often happens because rail's high cost forces transit agencies to cut bus service. When Los Angeles started building rail transit to white, middle-class neighborhoods, it cut bus service to black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The city lost more bus riders than it ever gained in rail riders, and an NAACP lawsuit forced the city to restore buses and curtail its rail plans.

Is light rail good for the environment? Hardly. Dallas and Denver light-rail lines consume about as much energy and emit about as much greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average SUV.

Engineering, construction, and rail car companies make huge profits from light rail. Their political contributions promote new rail lines. Siemens Transportation donated $100,000 to Denver's light-rail campaign and was rewarded with a $184 million railcar contract.

Some people say San Antonio should build light rail because Dallas and Houston have light rail. To paraphrase American mothers, if Dallas and Houston jumped off a cliff, should San Antonio jump as well?

Taxpayers lose because their money is wasted on rail when buses could do the same thing for less. Transit riders lose when transit agencies cut bus service to pay for rail. Commuters lose when money spent on rail, which does nothing to relieve congestion, delays projects that actually can reduce congestion.

Light rail is a giant hoax that makes rail contractors rich and taxpayers poor. San Antonio should be proud to be America's largest city that hasn't fallen for this hoax.

To be sure, Mr. Burress got caught because of what appears to have been stupid and irresponsible behavior connected with the handgun. But he does not face prison for shooting himself. His impending mandatory sentence highlights the unfairness and unconstitutionality of New York City's draconian gun laws.

Mr. Burress had previously had a handgun carry permit issued by Florida, for which he was required to pass a fingerprint-based background check. As a player for the Giants, he moved to Totowa, N.J., where he kept a Glock pistol. And last Friday night, he reportedly went to the Latin Quarter nightclub in midtown Manhattan carrying the loaded gun in his sweatpants. Because New York state permits to possess or carry handguns are not issued to nonresidents, Mr. Burress could not apply for a New York City permit.

At the nightclub, the handgun accidentally discharged, shooting Mr. Burress in the right thigh. He was not seriously injured, but he has been charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.

It appears that he put the unholstered gun in the waistband of his sweatpants, and when it slipped, he grabbed for it, accidentally hitting the trigger. To make matters worse, according to press accounts, he was seen drinking and may have been consuming alcohol -- which all firearms safety training (including the class he would have been required to take for his Florida permit) absolutely forbids for people handling guns. And of course Mr. Burress's handgun should have been holstered to prevent unintentional movement of the trigger. Fortunately, his negligent discharge did not harm anyone else.

Mr. Burress's behavior was bad. However, Mr. Burress is not facing prosecution for carelessness, but simply for carrying a weapon. This is unjust and perhaps unconstitutional. The legal issues are a bit tangled, but here is the background:

This summer, the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the District's handgun ban, and its ban on use of any firearm for self-defense in the home, violated the Second Amendment, which guarantees the individual right to bear arms. D.C. is a federal enclave, and the Court did not rule whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. But as other cases reach it in the wake of Heller, it will.

The Heller decision did not say that requiring a license to carry a gun was unconstitutional. But in New York State, nonresidents cannot even apply for the licenses to possess or carry a handgun. Unlike most other states, New York refuses to honor carry permits issued by sister states. Most observers believe that the Supreme Court will eventually make state and local governments obey the Second Amendment. If it does, New York's discrimination against nonresidents will probably be ruled unconstitutional.

And then there is the issue of the permitting process for residents. In 40 states, including Connecticut, law-abiding adults are issued permits once they pass a fingerprint-based background check and a safety class. In New Jersey, carry permits are virtually never issued. In New York City, carry permits are issued, but to applicants with some form of political clout rather than on the basis of his or her need for protection.

The Second Amendment might not require New Jersey or New York City to issue as liberally as Connecticut does. But with a population of several million and only a few thousand (consisting mainly of politicians, retired police and celebrities) able to get permits, New York City's licensing process is almost certainly unconstitutional on a number of grounds, including sheer arbitrariness.

Some commentators contend that Plaxico Burress should have hired bodyguards, instead of carrying a gun himself. Mr. Burress might now agree. But people who aren't as wealthy as he is also deserve to be safe, and they don't have the money for bodyguards. New York City needs to regularize its carry permit system so that law-abiding people can protect themselves, especially if their circumstances (such as being a witness to a gang crime) place them at heightened risk.

The Burress case also shows why mandatory sentences are a bad idea. He was careless but had no malign intent. Legislators and mayors like to appear tough by pushing through such draconian laws. Yet the victims are people like Mr. Burress whose conduct may have been improper, but who do not deserve the same sentences meted out to robbers and burglars.

Colorado’s Amendment 59 is the latest in a long series of efforts by the Left to undermine TABOR — and it represents the most serious threat that TABOR has ever faced. To explain why, some background is necessary.

Passed as an amendment to Colorado’s state constitution in 1992, TABOR limits government spending — capping it at the previous year’s total multiplied by the rate of inflation plus annual population growth. Any increases in tax rates or in state or local debt were made subject to voter approval. And government revenues that exceed TABOR’s tight spending cap had to be returned to taxpayers in the form of tax reductions.

Between 1997 and 2002, TABOR required Colorado to issue tax rebates totaling more than $3.2 billion. Not surprisingly, Colorado led the nation in tax relief and its economy was among the strongest in the country during this time. Accordingly, TABOR is rightly viewed by many fiscal conservatives as America’s best and most effective limit on government expansion.

Also not surprisingly, the media, unions, and many elected officials have opposed TABOR unrelentingly since its inception. In every year from 1993 to 1999, a proposal on the Colorado ballot sought either to raise taxes or to increase spending in excess of the TABOR limit.

Knowing these initiatives would markedly reduce the size of their annual tax rebate, Centennial State voters soundly defeated each of these measures. In 2000, however, TABOR opponents changed their strategy. Instead of attacking TABOR directly, they succeeded in passing Amendment 23, a spending mandate on K-12 education.

Two features of Amendment 23 created significant budgetary pressures in Colorado. First, it required that K-12 education spending grow at a rate faster than the TABOR limit. This effectively forced reductions in other parts of the Colorado budget. Even worse, Amendment 23 mandated increases in education spending even when state revenues declined. Between 2001 and 2003, a combination of the September 11 terrorist attacks and a severe drought caused state revenues to decline by over $1 billion. Despite this, Amendment 23 forced Colorado to increase K-12 education spending by $450 million at the same time.

In the face of this manufactured fiscal crisis, state-spending advocates in Colorado were quick to blame TABOR. This led to the passage of Referendum C in 2005, which suspended TABOR’s revenue limit for five years. This has allowed the legislature to spend, rather than rebate, all revenues over the TABOR limit. As such, Colorado’s growing economy has not funded tax relief as it had in previous years, but big government.

Data from Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee indicate that the legislature appropriated a total of 3.4 billion dollars above the TABOR limit between 2006 and 2008. This means that the average Colorado resident has missed out a total of $750 dollars in tax rebates during the past three fiscal years. In fact, latest projections have raised this projected tax hike from the passage of Referendum C from $3.7 billion to $6.1 billion. That number is likely to continue to grow in subsequent years. Furthermore, this increase in government revenue will increase the TABOR revenue limits when they come back into effect —resulting in a permanent increase in the size of government in Colorado.

Referendum C may have suspended and raised TABOR’s revenue caps, but they are still scheduled to return in 2010. However, on November 4, Coloradans will face the prospect of TABOR’s permanent nullification. Amendment 59 would require that all funds exceeding TABOR’s revenue limit be deposited in an account for schools — rather than being returned to taxpayers. Coloradans are being asked to surrender their tax rebates to a school system that has little improvement to show for the huge spending increases mandated by Amendment 23. Data from the state’s Department of Education indicate that high-school graduation rates have actually declined have since 2000, and dropout rates have increased.

If Amendment 59 passes in November, it would effectively be the third time in eight years that Colorado voters required the state to increase spending on education. Still TABOR opponents probably felt that 2008 presented the best opportunity for them to eliminate TABOR’s revenue limit altogether. The 2008 election cycle is not looking particularly good for Republicans and conservatives. More importantly, the benefits of TABOR’s revenue limit have largely been invisible — the limit has been suspended since 2005 and Colorado residents have not received any tax rebates since 2002.

However, a defeat of Amendment 59 would give TABOR a bright future. In 2010 TABOR’s revenue limit is scheduled to come back into effect. The subsequent tax rebates will doubtless increase TABOR’s visibility and popularity. Furthermore, starting in 2010 the constitutionally mandated increases in K-12 education spending are reduced, which will reduce fiscal pressures. Overall, TABOR was the first state-level fiscal limit that was both durable and effective. For a long time, it was heralded as a model by other states seeking to limit spending, promote tax relief, and spur their economy. A loss for Amendment 59 may be the first step in rehabilitating TABOR’s reputation both in Colorado — and across the country.

Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110-to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take few cars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.

Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollutionand greenhouse gas emissions by amere 0.7 to 1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.

These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail's market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn't work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?

As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers' money after bad. Once projects are completed , most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operational profits,while taxpayers will remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.

In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits. Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees.

This ninth biennial fiscal report card examines the tax and spending decisions made by the governors since 2003. It uses statistical data to grade the governors on their taxing and spending records – governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades, while those who have increased taxes and spending the most receive the lowest grades.

Three governors were awarded an "A" in this report card – Charlie Crist of Florida, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Eight governors were awarded an "F" – Martin O'Malley of Maryland, Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, Chet Culver of Iowa, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Bob Riley of Alabama, Jodi Rell of Connecticut, and C. L. "Butch" Otter of Idaho.

Republican governors, on average, received slightly higher grades than Democratic governors. More importantly, there has been a disappointing lack of major spending reforms among governors of both parties in recent years. State tax policies have also been uninspiring. Most tax cuts pursued by the governors have been small and targeted breaks, not broad-based rate cuts that can foster economic growth.

Fiscal policies need to be improved if the states are to meet the huge challenges ahead. Medicaid costs continue to rise, state debt is soaring, and the pension and health care plans of state workers have huge funding gaps. At the same time, rising international tax competition makes it imperative that states cut tax rates to attract jobs and investment. Governors don't have an easy job, but they do need to pursue more aggressive fiscal reforms to meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive economy.

Another ad followed, where a health-insurance company promised the same thing. Together, the pitchwoman and I eliminated coverage for chiropractors, acupuncturists, alcoholism treatment (I don't even drink), in-vitro fertilization, massage therapists and hairpieces. The she asked if I wanted to pay higher premiums to cut the premiums for people who wait until they are sick to buy coverage. (I passed.) All told, I saved $1,000 on a $7,000 policy.

Then she turned into my high-school calculus teacher and asked if I was ready to give my class presentation.

I awoke with a jolt - aware that I'd only dreamt the second ad. (And that it seems I'm still afraid of Mrs. DeConti.)

What I saw next was even scarier: The presidential debate, where Barack Obama told me how dangerous it would be to let me buy only the health-insurance features that I need.

Yet the fact that we can't do that is a big reason why an estimated 46 million Americans lack health coverage.

For example, thanks to lobbying by chiropractors and the like, the average state requires you to buy 38 "mandated benefits," like it or not.

A bigger problem are regulations that require you to pay higher premiums so that others can wait until they are sick to purchase insurance. Those "community rating" laws generally tax the young to subsidize the old - who have more money to begin with.

New York, New Jersey and other 19 states impose such laws. University of Pennsylvania economist Mark Pauly finds that they drive healthy people from the market, increase the number of uninsured - and do little to boost coverage for the sick.

Overall, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that state regulations boost premium costs an average of 15 percent.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to choose the features of your health policy, just like your auto insurance?

John McCain proposes to let you do just that, simply by letting you choose a plan available in another state. With the power to choose a policy regulated by a state with fewer mandated benefits and no community-rating laws, you could knock $1,000 off the price of a $7,000 plan.

This would boost coverage, too: A recent study by economists at the University of Minnesota suggests that McCain's proposal could cover an added 12 million Americans.

But Obama sees choice as dangerous. He fears that "where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings," no insurers would offer such coverage. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn echoes, "Less cancer screening under McCain's plan? Actually, yes."

Nonsense. California doesn't mandate colon-cancer screening, yet Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is a leader in such research and boasts the most aggressive screening program in the country.

Michigan doesn't mandate prostate or cervical cancer screening, yet six of the University of Michigan's seven insurance offerings cover both. That's where Cohn gets his insurance, so I'll bet him a fancy dinner that he has coverage for both, even without a mandate.

Cohn fears California consumers couldn't enforce protections crafted in, say, Delaware. Evidently, he's never heard of contract law, which lets California courts do just that.

Cohn frets that scam artists would cheat unwitting consumers - yet McCain's proposal would make fraud less likely. If insurance commissioners spent less time fixing prices and telling law-abiding people what kind of health insurance to buy, they'd have more resources to prosecute bad guys.

In the debate, Obama said, "We have a moral commitment as well as an economic imperative to do something about the health-care crisis." Indeed we do. The first step is to treat consumers like adults, and stop letting special interests and the government choose our health insurance for us.

The additional cost of housing in regions that use growth management can be called the planning tax. In many parts of the country, this tax averages hundreds of thousands of dollars per home. Growth management attempts to control either the rate of a city's or region's population growth or the location of that growth. Either way, it limits the ability of homebuilders to meet the demand for new housing. Thanks to growth management, someone buying a four-bedroom, two-and-one-haft bath home would have to spend more than $1,100,000 in San Jose, Calif., which has practiced growth management since 1970, and more than $550,000 in Seattle, which has practiced growth management since 1985. That same house would cost less than $250,000 in Raleigh and other cities that have no growth management, such as Houston (Tex.), Kansas City (Mo.), and Louisville (Ky.).

The most popular form of growth management today is called smart growth, which uses urban-growth boundaries and other tools to restrict development beyond the urban fringe and instead promote high-density development in the cities. Such restrictions drive up land prices and particularly increase the cost of the type of housing that most people prefer: single-family homes with a yard. When new home prices rise, the cost of existing homes follow as homesellers see that other homes are getting more expensive. This means that any policy that makes new homes more expensive--whether it is growth boundaries, impact fees, or a lengthy permitting process--will make all housing less affordable.

Although American cities have been planning and zoning since before 1920, growth management only began in the 1960s, when a few cities and states adopted policies aimed at restricting the rate of growth or controlling where growth would take place. Boulder, Colo., for instance, limits the number of building permits that can be issued each year and purchases land outside the city limits to prevent developers from building at the urban fringe. In 1961, Hawaii passed a statewide growth-management law requiring all cities to write such plans. Oregon followed in 1973. California passed a law in 1963 that gave cities control over the rural areas in each county; this unintentionally became the state's growth-management act.

The most telling fact about the recent housing bubble is that it did not occur everywhere. As economist Paul Krugman notes, prices rose most in what he calls "the zoned zone," regions where land-use restrictions "made it hard to build new houses." In the rest of the country, prices rose not much faster than the rate of inflation. In fact, all but one of the states that saw rapid home price increases have state growth-management laws or local government restrictions on housing supply. The one exception, Nevada, is 90% owned by the Federal government. Prior to 2000, the state's growth was enabled by Federal land sales but, when such sales slowed, homebuilders in Las Vegas and Reno literally ran out of private land. So Nevada's growth management effectively resulted from Federal--rather than state or local--policies.

At the same time, all but one of the states that have passed growth-management laws saw housing prices increase rapidly after 2000. The one exception, Tennessee, passed its law in 1998, and the law's implementation has yet to restrict new home construction.

Growth management is responsible for much of the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Because state and local restrictions on housing supplies sent prices soaring, families who ordinarily would have qualified for prime loans were compelled to borrow at subprime rates. When the housing bubble burst, housing prices dropped, leaving many families with mortgages greater than the value of their house. The resulting credit crisis has shaken the American economy to its core.

This was not the first housing bubble the U.S. has experienced, but it was the first to affect so many homes. A bubble took place in the 1970s in just the few states that then had growth-management laws. After more regions wrote growth-management plans, a second bubble in the 1980s affected several more states. The most recent bubble covered about 40% of the nation's housing.

There is a strong correlation between the year states and regions write growth-management plans and the year, usually very shortly afterwards, when housing prices begin to rise sharply. Historically, U.S. housing prices have risen at about the rate of inflation but, when regions or cities write growth-management plans, prices suddenly accelerate and housing quickly becomes unaffordable.

Research by Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser has found that land-use restrictions not only increase housing prices, they makes those prices more volatile. "If an area has a $10,000 increase in housing prices during one period, relative to national and regional trends," says Glaeser, "that area will lose $3,300 in housing value over the next five-year period."

Note that prices never fall to their original levels. This means that home prices in places like California, which has seen three booms and busts since 1970, become more unaffordable with each new boom. Of course, prices are higher in California partly because California incomes are higher than in many other states. A more valid measure of housing affordability is median home price divided by median family income, known as the price-to-income ratio. If the price-to-income ratio is less than 3.0, a median family can pay off a six percent mortgage on a median home out of 30% of its income in less than 15 years. At a ratio of 5, the family would have to spend 36% of its income to pay off the loan in 30 years. Since prime loans generally limit mortgage payments to about 30% of income, high price-to-income ratios force more families to get subprime mortgages.

Not surprisingly, the states with the highest price-to-income ratios are those with growth-management laws, such as Hawaii and California. The average price-to-income ratio in California is more than 8 and, in some of the state's urban areas, it is more than 10. By contrast, the price-to-income ratios in several fast-growing states with no growth-management laws, including North Carolina and Texas, are 2.5 or less.

Nationally, people who bought homes in 2006 were socked with more than $250,000,000,000 in planning taxes. About half of this was in California. Most of the rest was in nine states with mandatory growth-management laws--Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington--or in urban areas such as Denver (Colo.) and the Twin Cities (Minn.) that have adopted regional growth-management plans without state mandates. It is not clear that homebuyers are getting anything for this tax. Planners say the goal of growth management is to make cities more livable, but is there anything planners have done to make, say, San Jose (Calif.) more livable than Dallas (Tex.)? If the benefits are murky, it certainly is clear that planners have made San Jose, where the price-to-income ratio is more than 9, far less affordable than Dallas, where it only is slightly more than 2. No wonder that, since 1990, the Dallas urbanized area has grown by 40%, while Silicon Valley, the heart of the nation's fastest-growing industries, has grown by 10%.

The planning taxes paid by buyers of new homes simply are absorbed by the higher costs of home construction. Other than the impact fees collected by local governments, they mostly are a dead-weight loss to society. The planning taxes paid by buyers of existing homes at least have the virtue of not being a total loss, as they become windfall profits for the homesellers. Yet, homeowners may find that the benefits they get from growth management partly are an illusion. While they can borrow against their increased equity, they run a greater risk of seeing prices decline and owing more than their homes are worth. The only way they truly can realize their gains from high housing prices is to sell and move to an area that has not adopted such strict land-use policies.

Homeowners in high-priced markets who want to move to a larger house in the same region face the same cost barriers as first-time homebuyers. The worst cases are when--perhaps due to job transfers after a housing bubble has burst--people have to sell their homes "short," that is, for less than the amount remaining on their mortgages. Even if some homeowners profit nicely from growth management, this raises another issue: people who already own their own homes tend to have higher incomes and be wealthier than first-time homebuyers. So, the planning tax is a reverse-Robin Hood program: taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

A study by an Oregon economist, Randall Pozdena, found that, if all states had adopted his state's smart-growth policies before 1990, more than 1,000,000 fatuities that had become since 1990 would not have been purchase their homes. At least one-quarter of those families would be minorities, leading Joseph Perkins, a black radio and newspaper commentator in the San Francisco Bay area, to observe, "Smart growth is the new Jim Crow."

Nationally, more than 72% of white families own their own homes, but only 46% of black and Hispanic families are homeowners. High housing prices actually are driving black families out of the San Francisco Bay area. Intentionally or not, smart growth has become just one more impediment to families trying to escape poverty.

To make up for the loss in housing affordability, many areas that have passed growth-management plans have followed with rules requiring homebuilders to sell or rent a certain percentage of their homes to low- or moderate-income families at below-market prices. However, research by economists at San Jose State University has proven that this is self-defeating because homebuilders merely pass the costs onto other homebuyers, thus making the overall housing market even less affordable than before.

From 1940-60, U.S. homeownership rates grew from 44% to 62%. Since 1960, they have grown a mere seven percent. Many other countries, including Ireland, Italy, and Spain, enjoy much higher homeownership rates. Growth management is a major reason for the slowdown. Homeownership in California and Oregon peaked in 1960, while it has continued to grow in most states with no growth-management laws. Without growth management, overall U.S. rates would be well above 70%.

Why is homeownership so important? Studies show that owner-occupied homes create more stable neighborhoods, provide a better environment for raising children, and are a generator of wealth. Homeowners tend to take better care of their dwellings than renters. This means people who own their own homes usually live better than those who rent, and neighborhoods dominated by owner-occupied homes more likely are nicer than those dominated by renter-occupied homes. This especially is important for families with children. After adjusting for the income and education of their parents, children in families who own their own homes do better in school than those in families who rent--and the difference is greatest in low-income families.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto attributes the wealth of the U.S. in part to the ease with which people can buy their homes and then leverage the equity to start small businesses. "The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house," de Soto stresses.

Some people think homeownership has a downside. A study in Britain found that homeownership actually is an impediment to finding a job--but this, too, is due to growth management. Britain has practiced growth management since 1947, and price-to-income ratios there are between 6 and 9. British neighborhoods with high homeownership rates, the study found, also had high unemployment rates. When housing costs are so high, people cannot afford the realtor fees to sell their homes, so they remain jobless rather than move to a place where they can find work.

So far, this is not widespread in the U.S., where states and regions that do not practice growth management act as relief valves for the ones that do. However, "places with rapid price increases over one five-year period are more likely to have income and employment declines over the next five-year period," Glaeser notes.

Politically, the key to keeping housing affordable is to make sure that homebuilders have access to developable land outside of city limits. So long as this remains true, cities will welcome development within their boundaries to avoid losing property and sales tax revenues. If, however, cities can restrict development in rural areas, as they can under California's 1963 law, then they will feel free to impose high impact fees, add red tape to the permitting process, and otherwise increase the cost of home construction within their boundaries

Promoting compact cities

Smart growth explicitly seeks to give cities such control over rural development in order to promote more compact dries. Planners say this is needed to limit urban "sprawl," a pejorative term for the way most Americans live: in single-family homes with large yards. Moreover, this is the way most people say they aspire to live. Surveys show that more than 80% of Americans would rather live in a single-family home with a yard than live closer to shops, jobs, and transit. Moreover, this is not an exclusive American preference, as European cities also have suburbanized, and their suburbs, indicates urban historian Peter Hall, are "almost indistinguishable" from those in the U.S.

It is easy for people who already own their own homes to imagine that all future residents of their cities or regions will be happy to live in condos or apartments, but this is why growth management leads to unaffordable housing. Most people are not happy living in high densities, so the price of single-family homes goes up.

Contrary to some claims, there is no evidence that sprawl causes obesity or other health problems. Although research shows that people who are obese are slightly more inclined to live in the suburbs than others, the suburbs are not responsible for their health problems--nor do we need to curb sprawl to protect the environment. As Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History, points out, "The environmental effects of sprawl are benign."

Despite the impression you might get if you drive exclusively on Interstate freeways, urban growth does not threaten our farms, forests, or open spaces. The Census Bureau says that all U.S. urban areas occupy less than three percent of the nation's land. You might think that, as the nation's most populous state, California is overrun with sprawl. In fact, the state's growth-management plans have jammed 95% of its residents into just 5.1% of the state's land, making California urban areas the second most dense in the nation (trailing only New York City). If California residents had been allowed to "sprawl" at the same densities as other urban areas, they would occupy 8.5% of the state. Even the most ardent lovers of open space should find it hard to argue that tripling the state's housing costs is a fair price to pay for saving a mere 3.4% of the state's rural open space.

In most other states with growth-management laws, the amount of open space those laws protect is even more insignificant. Oregon's 1973 law restrains most development to within urban-growth boundaries that cover just 1.25% of the state. Yet, if Oregon's urban densities were the same as those in the rest of the nation, the additional sprawl would cover merely one-third of a percent more of the state's land.

Of course, when we say a particular law has "protected" open space from development, we usually mean that the law has denied rural landowners the right to use their property as they see fit. Because landowners receive no compensation for this taking of their property rights, it should be viewed with even greater outrage than the Supreme Court's recent decision allowing cities to take people's land by eminent domain--with compensation--and give that land to private developers.

Zoning originally was created to protect residential neighborhoods from the pollution of industry or the traffic generated by shopping malls. However, it is one thing to say, "You can build a house next to my house but not a factory because the factory will make me and my neighbors sick." It is quite another to say, "You can't develop your land at all just because I like the idea that every rural acre stays rural forever."

Russians say that Americans do not have any real problems, so they have to make them up. Urban sprawl is one of those made-up problems. Unfortunately for U.S. citizens, efforts to control sprawl have led to very real difficulties: unaffordable housing, higher land costs for business and industry, housing bubbles and busts, and increasing barriers to homeownership for low- and moderate-income families.

States that have passed growth-management laws should repeal them. States that have not passed such laws should avoid them--only then will we see homeownership rates rise and more individuals achieve the American dream of owning the home of their choice.

By tradition each state sets its own minimum age for alcohol, but Congress has intruded. A 1984 federal law decrees that if a state picks anything less than 21 it can lose 10% of its federal highway funds. That's why the debate is so bizarrely fixated on automobiles and the automobile infrastructure. But this debate should be about the desirability of a culture that fosters freedom and responsibility, not about cars and how many people of what age die in them.

The enjoyment (and abuse) of alcohol is an ancient part of human life. Traces of wine have been found in 9,000-year-old Chinese pottery. Kid tipplers are nothing new, either. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, taught that infants should be given wine ("diluted and not at all cold") to gain strength. John Nye, an expert in the economic history of alcohol, points out that beer was the biggest budget line in some 18th-century Dutch orphanages.

UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman, an ex-advocate of age restrictions, told PBS that he came around to the no-limits position when he saw a billboard that said, "If you're not 21, it's not Miller Time--yet." Age limits make drinking a badge of adulthood and build in the minds of teens a romantic sense of the transgressive danger of alcohol. That's what so often leads to the abuse of alcohol as a ritual of release from the authority of parents. And that's what has the college presidents worried. They see it.

There's certainly evidence that if we got rid of age limits, teens would drink more. But drinking more is a drinking problem only in the minds of neoprohibitionists. In a 2003 survey 22% of American tenth graders said they'd had five or more consecutive drinks in the last 30 days. But in Denmark, where there's no legal minimum to drink (though you have to be 18 to buy), 60% of 15- and 16-year-olds said they'd thrown back five or more in a row within the last couple of fortnights. Maybe you think that's too much. But the European champion of heavy teen drinking ranks as the world's happiest country and scores third in the United Nation's 2007 ranking of child welfare. In the UN listing the U.S. came in 20th out of 21 wealthy countries.

Then there are the car crashes. It is an article of faith among much of the U.S. government that raising the drinking age to 21 averted thousands of grisly traffic deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with deceptive five-figure precision, puts the number at 21,887 through 2002. But even this statistical factoid, the neoprohibitionist trump card, deserves scrutiny. A recent research paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and his former student Elina Tetelbaum shows that states that raised the drinking age to 21 since 1984, in response to Congress' road-funding threats, enjoyed no statistically significant decrease in traffic fatalities for 18- to 20-year-olds. They point to the decades-long, steady decline in the rate of traffic fatalities (deaths per billion passenger miles), a decline due in large part to safer cars, improved driver education and better medical technology. Raising the drinking age did little or nothing.

Drinking by itself just isn't very dangerous. But driving is. Despite more relaxed drinking-age laws, the EU, according to Miron and Tetelbaum, averaged 95 fatalities per million inhabitants in the past decade while the U.S. experienced 150 fatalities per million. The big difference is that in many EU countries you have to wait until 18 to get behind the wheel. If you're worried about car wrecks, regulate drivers.

Salt makes things taste better. If you eat too much, it can kill you. But we don't need laws regulating salt. In an America without a minimum drinking age, we would shift our focus from demon rum and car crash statistics to creating an environment where parents are expected to supervise their children and alcohol would become for teens just another thing, like bicycles or swimming pools, that can either make your day or take your life.

In contrast, I argue here that licensure not only fails to protect consumers from incompetent physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, makes health care more expensive and less accessible. Institutional oversight and a sophisticated network of private accrediting and certification organizations, all motivated by the need to protect reputations and avoid legal liability, offer whatever consumer protections exist today.

Consumers would benefit were states to eliminate professional licensing in medicine and leave education, credentialing, and scope-of-practice decisions entirely to the private sector and the courts.

If eliminating licensing is politically infeasible, some preliminary steps might be generally acceptable. States could increase workforce mobility by recognizing licenses issued by other states. For mid-level clinicians, eliminating education requirements beyond an initial degree would allow employers and consumers to select the appropriate level of expertise. At the very least, state legislators should be alert to the self-interest of medical professional organizations that may lie behind the licensing proposals brought to the legislature for approval.

This costs almost as much as the original construction, which means for taxpayers that rails are a "pay now, pay more later" proposition.

The Chicago Transit Authority is on the verge of financial collapse. The agency estimates it needs $16 billion it doesn’t have to rehabilitate tracks and trains.

To keep the trains running, the agency siphoned money away from the city’s bus system and lost a third of its bus riders between 1986 and 1996.

Newer systems face other financial challenges. San Jose’s light-rail system put the city’s transit agency so far in debt that when sales tax revenues fell short early in this decade, it was forced to cut bus and rail service by 20 percent.

Rail construction almost always costs more than the original estimates.

Denver voters approved a 119-mile rail system in 2004 on the promise that it would cost $4.7 billion to build it by 2017. The current estimate is up to $7.9 billion, and the regional transit agency says the system might not be complete until 2034.

Once built, light-rail systems never live up to their promises, even in places like Portland. Before building light rail, Portland’s bus system carried 9.8 percent of the region’s transit riders to work. Today, thanks to cutbacks in the bus system forced by the high cost of rail, transit carries just 7.6 percent.

Nor is rail transit good for the environment. Most U.S. light-rail lines use more energy, per passenger mile, than an SUV.

Considering that most of Missouri’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, a Kansas City light rail, like the ones in Dallas, Denver and Cleveland, is also likely to produce more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than an SUV.

Buses can provide better, faster, safer transit service than light rail at a far lower cost.

Light rail is a hoax perpetrated on taxpayers by companies that profit from designing and building rail lines.

Rail advocates tell Kansas Citians that they need to catch up with other cities that have rail transit. I suggest instead that Kansas City should be proud not to fall for the light-rail hoax.

Marsella says "no one could have predicted" that rising steel, concrete and energy prices would drive up the cost of FasTracks from the promised $4.7 billion to the current estimate of $7.9 billion. Yet, as Danish planner Bent Flyvbjerg points out in his book, Megaprojects, something like this always happens in projects of this scale.

Flyvbjerg observes that megaprojects like FasTracks inevitably suffer from "optimism bias." RTD's financial plan, for example, assumed the Denver economy would not suffer a single recession between 2004 and 2017. Because that proved false, RTD now says sales tax revenues will fall $2.8 billion short of its earlier expectations.

FasTracks promoters were also guilty of what Flyvbjerg calls "strategic misrepresentation" (i.e., lying) when they repeatedly told the public that RTD has built all its light-rail lines "on budget." In reality, both the Southeast and Southwest lines cost far more than RTD's original estimates.

When the costs of those lines went up, RTD revised its budgets upward, allowing it to later claim that they were built "on budget." The 68 percent increase in FasTracks costs is about par for RTD's course.

Environmentally, light rail is a disaster for the region. For every passenger mile carried, light rail consumes four times as much land as Denver-area freeways. It also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than the average SUV.

Light-rail riders don't save energy; they merely make someone else pay their energy bills.

Marsella now says RTD has three choices: scale back construction, delay completion of FasTracks until as late as 2034, or raise taxes again. But there is a fourth choice: cancel FasTracks.

Without the tax increase voters approved in 2004, RTD can improve bus service in every FasTracks corridor, operating buses as fast and as frequently as the proposed FasTracks rail lines.

RTD's own analyses of FasTracks corridors showed that bus rapid transit using a combination of high-occupancy lanes and existing roads would cost less and do more to relieve congestion than rail.

So why did RTD pick rail, the high-cost, low-benefit solution?

One answer is that rail lines create lots of profits for the companies that supported the FasTracks campaign. For example, Siemens donated more than $100,000 to the FasTracks campaign and was rewarded by RTD with a $187 million no-bid contract for light-rail cars.

The other support for FasTracks comes from those who want to socially engineer Colorado lifestyles. They use light rail as an excuse to build tax-subsidized high-density housing projects on properties taken from their owners by eminent domain near planned rail stations. Yet few Americans aspire to live in such dense housing, and such compact development makes little sense in a state that is 97 percent rural open space.

Canceling FasTracks will save taxpayers billions of dollars and allow RTD to make almost immediate improvements in bus service, rather than having to wait years to complete rail lines. This is the best solution for both taxpayers and transit riders.

A lawyer for Florida's teachers union will argue that they should be removed from the ballot; the secretary of state's lawyer will ask the court to leave them in place, allowing voters to decide these questions. The court should let Floridians have their say.

The first question, Amendment 7, deals with religious discrimination. This amendment would make it illegal to exclude any person or organization from participating in a public program because of religion. It also would allow the state to continue operating programs under which religious organizations can receive funding as long as the purposes and primary effects of those programs are secular (as required by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution).

The second question, Amendment 9, would require at least 65 percent of school-district operating expenditures to be spent in the classroom rather than on administration. It also would allow legislators to create alternative education programs in addition to the constitutionally required public-school system (though it wouldn't create any new programs).

Judge John Cooper of Tallahassee's Circuit Court already approved both questions for inclusion on the November ballot, and opponents have asked the state Supreme Court to reverse his decision. It would be a surprise if the court were to oblige them. Cooper's written opinion was short and simple, demonstrating that the questions were legally added to the ballot, and that their wording is not misleading as plaintiffs claimed.

But although the legal details of the case seem almost trivial, the principles at stake, especially on Amendment 9, are momentous. This question would decide whether Florida children have access to the best system of education legislators can devise, or if they will be forced to make do with the status quo. And the status quo is nothing to cheer about.

In the early grades, Florida students have made some promising academic headway in recent years, but SAT scores are down from a decade ago -- a decline that can't be fully explained by changes in the number of students taking the test. Florida's graduation rate places it 42nd in the nation, even though it is in the middle of the pack when it comes to total spending per pupil ($12,000 last year).

But, ever since the Florida Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Bush v. Holmes, legislators have been forbidden to offer families any new alternatives to the traditional public-school system. If Amendment 9 does make it onto the ballot, and voters approve it, lawmakers would once again be free to design new educational options to serve Florida families. The amendment wouldn't create a single new program; it would just permit legislators to create such programs if they wished to do so.

And that's what's so remarkable about the case before the court on Wednesday. The Florida Education Association, the union representing the state's public-school employees, has sued to prevent Floridians from even having a say on the future of public education. Would it even make sense to keep calling it a "public" school system if voters are given no voice in the matter?

It's no surprise that the union opposes this amendment, because it opposes any education program that would provide families with an alternative to the schools employing its members. That's only natural. And it's no surprise that school-choice supporters are in favor of the amendment, because many of their proposals will be impossible without it.

But, in the end, it is the people's education system, and the people should have a right to decide whether or not they want alternatives to it.

It's time for Congress to use the power granted to it in the Constitution to "exercise exclusive legislation" in the District and uphold its residents' constitutional rights. It can do so by passing the District of Columbia Personal Protection Act now pending in Congress, with a few adjustments. This bill, introduced on July 31 with 57 cosponsors, would prevent D.C. from passing regulations that discourage the private lawful use of firearms or otherwise suppress residents' Second Amendment rights. It is the result of a compromise between the National Rifle Association and House leaders.

To ensure broad-based, bipartisan support, we propose four modest congressional actions that would preserve some home-rule authority while erecting a commonsense framework for restoring the right to self-defense in our nation's capital.

First, Congress should change how D.C. processes gun registrations. Currently, residents must complete an application form, submit photographs, prove residency and good vision, pass a written test, pay a fee, be fingerprinted, and have the gun ballistics tested. The entire process can take months.

Congress should mandate a more streamlined process for D.C. based on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is already required by federal law for all retail firearm sales. Background checks are usually completed within a few hours.

Second, D.C. still bans all "machine guns," improperly defined as any gun capable of firing 12 or more rounds without reloading -- even if the gun owner has a magazine with fewer rounds. As a result, only revolvers or single-shot handguns can be registered. But semiautomatic handguns constitute about three-quarters of handguns sold in the U.S. Banning them violates the Supreme Court's rule in District of Columbia v. Heller against "prohibition of an entire class of 'arms' that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society" for lawful self-defense.

The new guidepost should be that a firearm may not be banned unless it is prohibited by federal law or subject to the National Firearms Act, which covers weapons such as real machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.

Third, D.C. still requires that weapons in the home be unloaded and either disassembled, trigger-locked or kept in a gun safe. An exception is made for a firearm while being used against a threat of immediate harm within the home. That exception is unconstitutionally vague. According to acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles, a homeowner cannot have an unlocked and loaded gun even when investigating the sound of intruders in her backyard.

Any rule requiring a crime victim to wait until her attacker has actually entered the home is unreasonable. Congress should bar D.C. from prohibiting or infringing a home use of firearms for self-protection. Within that constraint, D.C. can fashion sensible safe-storage regulations.

Fourth, under federal law, buyers may acquire a handgun only within their state of residence: Out-of-state sellers must first ship the gun to someone in-state who has a Federal Firearms License.

However, because of the District's 1976 gun ban, there are no stores selling guns within the city, and only one or two federal firearms licensees willing to take delivery from outside on a limited basis. It will be months before gun dealers are licensed. Thus, D.C. residents who do not own a handgun cannot obtain one, and cannot exercise their constitutional right, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to defend themselves where they live. Congress should revamp the federal restrictions on interstate handgun sales to allow, at a minimum, District residents to purchase handguns in Maryland or Virginia. Like rifles and shotguns, handguns should be obtainable from an out-of-state licensee if the sale complies with laws applicable where the buyer resides and where the sale occurs.

Over the years, our elected representatives have adopted a court-centric view of the Constitution -- a view that decisions about constitutionality are properly left to the judiciary. But members of Congress also swear to uphold the Constitution. Congress can make good on that oath by restoring the right of Washington, D.C., residents to possess functional firearms in their homes.

First, a new Harvard study came out alleging that the tobacco industry manipulated menthol levels in cigarettes to hook young smokers in violation of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which bans tobacco companies from targeting youths. And second, billionaires Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill Gates last week threw their support behind a new $500 million worldwide effort to stop smoking.

Whatever the tobacco companies may have done with menthol levels, the bigger scandal is how states have misspent the billions paid to them by the tobacco industry. And however well-intentioned, the Gates-Bloomberg effort, which involves the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is likely to fail because the tobacco control programs that it will fund - featuring such things as higher taxes, smoking bans and advertising restrictions - have failed before. These multiple shortcomings point to the need for a new, more effective approach to handling, and funding, tobacco prevention.

The Master Settlement Agreement resulted in a payment of $206 billion by the tobacco industry to 46 states over 25 years for smoking prevention. The states also receive annual payments in perpetuity based on inflation and cigarette sales.

When the agreement was signed, the state attorneys general pledged that this massive windfall would go toward funding smoking prevention programs. However, from the moment the states got their hands on the tobacco settlement money, this has not been the case. Instead of being spent on smoking prevention, the billions have gone to such things as expanded broadband cable networks, museum development, sewer upgrades, new schools and parks, economic development and general tax rebates.

Maryland's share of the settlement is $4.4 billion over 25 years. Yet the state falls short of the minimum amount recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for state tobacco prevention spending: $30.3 million per year. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in fiscal year 2007, Maryland spent only $18.7 million from tobacco settlement and tax revenues to prevent and reduce tobacco use.

The CDC recommends that the states invest 20 percent to 25 percent of the money they receive in tobacco control. Only three states ( Maine, Delaware and Colorado) are funding their smoking prevention efforts at the CDC-recommended level. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the states will receive $24.9 billion this year from the settlement and tobacco taxes, of which they will spend approximately 3 percent on tobacco control.

Yet the tobacco settlement scandal is greater than the states' refusal to spend money for tobacco control on tobacco control. That's because even the meager efforts they do undertake bear little fruit.

For example, an enormous smoking prevention program in 11 communities called COMMIT (Community Intervention Trial for Smoking Cessation) was designed to help smokers, particularly heavy smokers, quit. It was a huge failure. Similarly, the largest attempt to put smoking prevention theory into practice was the American Stop Smoking Intervention Study (ASSIST), an eight-year project involving 17 states and run by the National Cancer Institute. This project possessed all of the bells and whistles of traditional smoking prevention: limiting tobacco advertising, restricting public smoking and making it harder for kids to access tobacco. Nevertheless, the project failed to produce a statistically significant reduction in smoking prevalence and consumption.

True, the U.S. smoking rate has declined sharply, but this trend began before the onset of significant government regulation and has continued, in large measure, because our society has continued to grow wealthier. Higher incomes stimulate public interest in, and concern about, matters of personal and public health.

A big part of the problem is that most anti-tobacco groups spent the last 25 years operating on the erroneous assumption that if you could prevent the tobacco industry from marketing, you could stop people from smoking. Most tobacco control efforts have failed because they have not been linked to the right predictors of becoming a smoker. These include socioeconomic status, connection and success at school, self-esteem, family structure and relations with parents.

Likewise, the $500 million in the Gates-Bloomberg plan would be far better spent on advocating for educational, economic and trade policies that would raise living standards and, consequently, dampen public interest in smoking - without the heavy hand of government intervention.

Ten years and $53 billion after the tobacco settlement windfall, there is precious little to show in terms of credible smoking prevention. It's time for Congress - and perhaps the president - to step in and demand that the states live up to their promise to use the settlement money for effective tobacco prevention. To ensure the settlement money has an impact, it needs to be diverted from projects unrelated to smoking and then placed into interventions that are based on what the best evidence shows are the real reasons kids start using cigarettes.

Until that happens, anti-tobacco efforts - whether funded by the states or by well-intentioned billionaires - will continue to amount to little more than blowing smoke.

Our answer is, well, yes. Baltimore deserves the Third-World profile it has developed because it has expanses of crumbling, crime-riddled neighborhoods populated by low-income renters, an absent middle class, and just a few enclaves of high-income gentry near the Inner Harbor or in suburbs.

This wasn't what Baltimore looked like in the 1950s. Then it was a prosperous, blue-collar city of about 950,000 with a median family income 6.6% above the national average. Back in the good old days, Baltimore had a smaller percentage of residents living in poverty (22.7%) than the nation as a whole (27.8%), and a greater percentage of families (23.1%) earning a middle-class income of at least $44,600 in today's dollars than the rest of the country (19.1%).

Today, the city has a population that is almost 50% smaller, and about 40% of families with children live at or near the federal poverty line. Among the country's 100 most populous cities, Baltimore ranks a shameful 87th on median household income.

How did this happen?

Most people think of cities as dense concentrations of people. They are that, of course. But they are also dense concentrations of capital – homes, offices, factories, theaters and roads. All of these assets are attractive to people because, when they are in close proximity to each other, they offer the chance of a more prosperous life.

The problem is that once capital is built, it can become a target for tax-and-spend politicians who bank on the fact that physical capital will continue to draw people, even as it is taxed more heavily. This is what has happened in Baltimore. The city has waged a war on capital for more than 50 years, raising property taxes an astonishing 21 times from 1950 to 1985.

But what politicians don't seem to understand is that the target may be degraded or destroyed in the process. There are now at least 30,000 housing units in Baltimore that are abandoned and waiting to be demolished, while even old, upper-crust neighborhoods now have a seedy look. Property taxes are so high – as well as the strong likelihood they will soar even higher in the future – that even maintenance, no less capital improvements, are a losing proposition. Renovations or upgrades may add less value to a house than it will cost in taxes on that house with a higher assessed value.

Politicians, in short, reason that because physical capital cannot typically be picked up and moved, it is immutable. Wrong. It depreciates. Fail to replenish or improve it, and it decays to uselessness.

Moreover, while physical capital may not be mobile, financial and human capital are. Property tax rates in Baltimore County (outside the city) are less than half of those inside the city (1.1% versus 2.268%). The suburbs are thriving even with the center city decaying.

In the 1990s, private-sector employment shrank 12.7% (a loss of 46,800 jobs) in Baltimore. From 2000 to 2007 it shrank again, this time by 10.4% (33,600 jobs). By contrast, employment in the rest of the metro area grew by 25.1% in the 1990s, and by another 13.9% since 2000.

To the extent that city officials recognize the problem, they seem to confuse symptoms with the root cause of the economy's disease. For them, poverty, street crime or bad schools are the problem. Their solution is always more social spending and still-higher taxes, together with targeted tax breaks and subsidies aimed at bringing "big footprint" development projects downtown. And because the city has managed to entice developers to build a few large projects (the National Aquarium, two stadiums, several office towers, upscale hotels and pricey waterfront condos), the champions of public redevelopment argue that the city is on the right track.

True enough, the ability to hand out subsidies gives officials great power. But it also gives them a reason, and incentive, to dismiss the common sense that if tax breaks for the well-connected are a good idea, lower tax rates across the board would lead to broad-based redevelopment.

The person best positioned to put an end to the city's war on capital is Democratic Mayor Sheila Dixon. Over the past year she even hinted at making tax reform a priority.

In December, a commission appointed by Ms. Dixon concluded that the city should immediately cut its property tax rate to 2.02% and, within a few years, reduce it further to 1.614%. That isn't going to happen, however. Her budget, approved last month, raised spending 11% and reneged on a promise made by Gov. Martin O'Malley when he was still mayor in 2006 to cut property taxes by 0.02% to 2.248%.

But the issue of property taxes and development is not yet over. The state prosecutor is currently looking into allegations that Ms. Dixon took gifts from property developers while giving special tax breaks.

The evergreen rationale for high property-tax rates is that a city can't afford low ones. When she announced her spending plan for the year, Ms. Dixon insisted that "people think there's fat within the budget, [but] it's very lean."

Left unsaid: The city spends 61% more per person than the surrounding county. And in reality, cutting property taxes would only temporarily cut property tax receipts. Making Baltimore friendly to capital investment would unlock a flood of new (unsubsidized) investment that would restore revenues and facilitate an organic, widespread renewal of the city.

What's needed is the political will to tighten the bureaucracy's belt in the near term, and the ingenuity to create a fiscal bridge to a recapitalized, healthier city. So far, Baltimore is sticking with its "capital punishment" policies and it's killing the city.